Aptitude test tough for Telugu-medium aspirants

The number of Telugumedium aspirants qualifying for All India Services like the IAS, IPS and IFS had fallen drastically since the introduction of the CSAT in the prelims.

In 2010, 69 Telugumedium aspirants from united Andhra Pradesh had cracked the civil services exam, but this number went down to just 29 in 2011, when CSAT was introduced. The number further dwindled to just one or two in subsequent years, say experts.

The CSAT was first mooted by the Y.K. Alagh Committee in 2001 in its report where it proposed the introduction of an exam to test the logical and analytical skills of students.

The Committee had proposed this because it found serious deficiencies in the selection of recruits for the IAS, IPS, IFS etc.

The syllabus had been finalised by the S.K. Khanna Committee in 2010 and it was implemented in 2011.

Subsequently the number of Telugu-medium students qualifying in the civil services exam drastically fell from 69 in 2010 to 29 in 2011.

“The data for subsequent years is not available with the UPSC but there have hardly been one or two Telugu-medium students in the last couple of years,” said V. Gopal Krishna, director of Brain Tree.

Last year, the Arvind Verma Committee suggested that no changes should be made to the CSAT and the civil services qualifying exam. But it had said that the quality of translations of the English comprehensions should improve. However, that didn’t solve the problems of Telugu and other Indian language speaking students.